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The Weird History of the Microsoft Windows Start Button

Posted by samzenpus on from the and-that's-what-happened dept.

Gamoid writes: Windows 3.1 was so complicated that even a Boeing propulsion scientist couldn't figure out how to open a word processor. A behavioral scientist, who once worked with BF Skinner at Harvard, was brought in to Microsoft to figure out what was going wrong — and he came up with the Start button, for which he holds the patent today. It's a weird and cool look at how simple ideas aren't obvious.

15 of 270 comments (clear)

  1. The only intuitive interface is the nipple by musmax · · Score: 4, Informative

    and it will be forever great.

    1. Re:The only intuitive interface is the nipple by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Informative

      You need to teach your baby to use the nipple, too.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re: The only intuitive interface is the nipple by Sique · · Score: 1, Informative

      Actually, no, they don't. And yes, I have been present at a child's birth, and because my wife was sedated and lost huge amounts of blood during the sectio, for the first few hours, I was holding the child. And no, he didn't start to search for a nipple all by himself, I actually had to hold the baby bottle right to his mouth until he grabbed it with his lips and was starting to suck on it.

      --
      .sig: Sique *sigh*
  2. Re:wtf? by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Informative

    Windows 3.1 wasn't complicated at all. What kind of moron thinks otherwise??

    A Boeing propulsion scientist.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  3. MenuChoice and HAM (1992) by tepples · · Score: 5, Informative

    System 7, introduced in 1991, had an Apple menu, which held shortcuts (called "aliases") to applications. Third-party extensions such as MenuChoice and HAM, released the following year, allowed aliases to be grouped into folders. (This is exactly the behavior that Microsoft would later implement in the "Programs" section of Windows 95's Start menu.) Apple later bought the rights to HAM and integrated it in System 7.5 (1995) under the name Apple Menu Options.

    1. Re:MenuChoice and HAM (1992) by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Informative

      I was kinda surprised Microsoft didn't get sued. It was pure Mac without the finesse.

      Did you sleep through the 1990s? Microsoft got sued.

    2. Re:MenuChoice and HAM (1992) by MacTO · · Score: 5, Informative

      The Apple menu wasn't quite the Start Menu. It was similar in the sense that you could add programs in it to use it as an application launcher, but that was simply a consequence of the history of the Macintosh system software. Older versions of the system software placed device driver like desk accessories in the Apple menu. With System 7, those desk accessories became normal applications and redesigned Apple menu was changed to take that into account. Indeed, I'd be surprised if Apple intended it to be used as a generic application launcher.

      In contrast, the Start Menu was designed to contain every application on the system. This means that it was a genuine starting point, rather than a place to access commonly used applications. The designs even reflect that. With the Apple menu, you were given a menu with analogs to the old desk accessories and you had to add anything else yourself. With the Start Menu, you are given a menu that contains all of the applications on the system and you have to removed unwanted stuff yourself.

    3. Re:MenuChoice and HAM (1992) by dcollins117 · · Score: 5, Informative

      The other absolutely amazing thing they introduced in Windows 95 was the shortcut.

      Otherwise known as soft links or symbolic links, which DEC and RDOS have had since 1978.

      I'll assume when you say "they introduced" you meant to say "they copied" in the same manner as MSDOS is really a clone of CP/M and the Windows GUI was copied from Apple, etc.

    4. Re:MenuChoice and HAM (1992) by Solandri · · Score: 4, Informative

      The Apple Menu inverts the Windows paradigm. Your Mac's desktop lists the apps installed in the filesystem (in fact the desktop is pretty much the root of the filesystem), the Apple Menu has your shortcuts. Whereas in Windows your desktop has your shortcuts, and the Start menu lists the apps installed in the filesystem.

      This is a consequence of how the two OSes started out. MacOS was coded from the start as a GUI, so logically the desktop is the root of your filesystem. Windows was originally a shell running on DOS. So all your files were stored in the DOS filesystem, and originally the desktop just had shortcuts to your program and data files. (OS X complicated this somewhat since it is now a GUI running on top of a modified version of BSD Unix.)

    5. Re:MenuChoice and HAM (1992) by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Informative

      There are a few differences. First, symlinks are a property of the filesystem. This means that the normal filesystem APIs just work with them and you need special APIs for things that care about whether it's a link or not. In contrast, shortcuts are just another kind of file and everything that wants to follow them needs to know what the target is. Second, shortcuts contain a lot more information than just a path: they include the path to the destination file, an icon, the set of command-line arguments to pass, and some other flags. For example, I used to have a load of different shortcuts to the WinQuake (and, later, GLQuake) executable that all had different -game flags, for launching different mods. Many of them also had different icons, if the mod came with its own icon. You can't do that with symlinks.

      The closest thing to symlinks on *NIX systems is .desktop files.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  4. Start to stop on Super NES by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

    On the Nintendo Entertainment System, players pressed the controller's Start button to pause (that is, stop) the game. By the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, many games were adding a quit option to the pause menu, so Start to stop was becoming believable.

  5. "to this very day..." by PopeRatzo · · Score: 5, Informative

    and he came up with the Start button, for which he holds the patent today.

    Oh, how I hate our patent system.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  6. Re:Difficulty by GauteL · · Score: 3, Informative

    On the contrary. If you read the article, nobody said being a Boing propulsion scientist makes him all-knowing. The statement was as a response to a programmer's exclamation that "our customers are morons!". The fact that he was a propulsion scientist is a strong indication that he was not a moron, thus making it reasonable to have a look to see if perhaps it wasn't the users there was a problem with.

    The goal of the project was to make Windows "discoverable", in essence making it possible for the average person to figure out the most important things without attending a training course. A reasonable requirement for a commercial consumer product. The user tests demonstrated that Windows 3.1 wasn't discoverable.

  7. Chicago by darkain · · Score: 3, Informative

    Maybe I missed it, but there appeared to be no references to Windows Chicago at all? The article makes it seem like the START button just appeared out of thin air, not a series of trial and error over time. Check out this document which highlights the evolutionary processes that happened between Windows 3.1 and 95

    http://oyvind.servehttp.com/wi...

  8. Re:Major change? No. by demonlapin · · Score: 4, Informative

    My recollection differs. Games were slower under Windows than DOS due to the overhead, and they definitely still crashed. You didn't have to have boot disks with "gaming" configurations to free up enough low memory, though.